UNSINKABLE THE TITANIC SAILS ON

Ship sails. Ship hits iceberg. Ship goes down. Fifteen hundred people die. It's not much of a feel-good formula. But that hasn't stopped the sinking of the Royal Mail Steamer Titanic on the night of April 14-15, 1912, from becoming, arguably, the century's most enduring single-event story. Worldwide reference point. Synonym for catastrophe. Permanent warning against the folly of mortals who would build a boat and call it "unsinkable.

" "In my opinion the disaster changed nothing except shipping regulations," says Steven Biel, author of the book "Down With the Old Canoe.

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" "But what has endured are all the meanings we have loaded on top of it. "In that sense, it's as if the ship never went down. It just keeps sailing on.

" It's certainly steaming along right now. In the last year it has spawned a hit Broadway show, a half dozen books, countless TV specials, a traveling artifact exhibition and two CDs of Titanic music, Rhino's "Music as Heard on the Fateful Voyage" and Memphis Archives' "Music Aboard the Titanic.

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" "There isn't a day when I don't hear a Titanic reference," says Perry Lonzello of New Jersey, a Titanic collector and historian. Widespread fascination no doubt helped the Broadway show, which opened to average reviews amid considerable trepidation. "You saw they were doing `Titanic, The Musical,' and you thought, `Springtime for Hitler,' " says Lonzello. "But it's a great show and it's obviously become a huge hit.

" True. It won several Tony Awards and lately has been playing to capacity crowds breaking a house box-office record Thanksgiving week by taking in $740,000. Moreover, all the rest may be mere warmup for "Titanic," the movie a $200 million monster that splashes into theaters Friday. This "Titanic" uses the ill-fated voyage as the backdrop for a love story that sounds like it was ripped from a 1980s John Hughes movie: Girl from the first-class section falls in love with Boy from below deck. Can love conquer all? Can love stay afloat when the ship sinks? It's a sprawling epic, loaded with gargantuan effects and even computer models which can be introduced because the story is told in flashback by a survivor. "And that's a very smart thing," says Joy Browne, psychologist and movie reviewer on WOR, because "it means that we know someone will survive. We don't just watch for three hours, everyone dies and we go home.

" Not that "Titanic" which needless to say must make a boatload of money to stay afloat will please everyone. Musician Ian Whitcomb, who compiled the Rhino "Titanic" CD and has named his own band the White Star Orchestra after the Titanic's ensemble, says that when he started consulting on the film, he saw that the script called for the orchestra to be playing "Nearer My God to Thee" at the end. "That's the myth, but it didn't happen," says Whitcomb. "It was a story published in newspapers at the time because it made good copy. Actually, the band stopped playing an hour before the boat sank, and the evidence is that their last song was `Songe d'Automne,' a popular tune of the time.

" Biel says the mere fact the band's last song is still a point of discussion underscores the depth of our fascination. "There's really no other event in this century that compares to the Titanic," he says. "People know Pearl Harbor, but in the context that it started a world war. The Titanic was self-contained.

" Except, of course, in metaphor. Titanic debris was still bobbing in the water, Biel points out, when preachers began thundering that this was God's warning against the arrogance of technology. Fierce debates raged over whether the widely admired "women and children into the lifeboats first" policy negated arguments that women deserved the equality of the right to vote. In black folklore, the Titanic quickly became a fable of sweet justice. There were no blacks aboard the Titanic, but black storytellers put one there: Shine, the mythic hero with superhuman powers. Shine warns the white folks their ship is doomed, but they pay no attention to a mere black man until it's too late, at which point he ignores their frantic pleas, says have a nice day, jumps over the side and dashes back to dry land. This is the punch line Langston Hughes picked up in 1956 in Harlem: "When all them white folks died and went to heaven / Shine was back in Sugar Ray's drinkin' Seagrams Seven.

" The modern wave of Titanic mania began in 1955 with the publication of Walter Lord's defining book, "A Night to Remember.

" Lord's vivid re-creation, based on interviews with dozens of survivors, was made into a memorable British movie and helped spark what Biel sees as a second-generation wave of reflection. "That's when we started hearing how the Titanic marked the point at which the `good old days' ended and the `bad new days' began," Biel says. "When the Titanic went down, the world changed. Our innocence ended. We became suspicious and mistrustful. "Actually, those kinds of changes had a lot more to do with the rise of corporate capitalism than the sinking of the Titanic. But the Titanic makes a much easier symbol.

" Clearly there are also other elements that have given the Titanic story its long legs. Browne points to a universal dread of drowning, compounded in this case by having two hours to think about it. (Actually, Whitcomb points out that most victims technically did not drown. They died of exposure in the frigid water, which still isn't most folks' first choice.) The real-life Titanic also had a striking cast, from the nameless masses in steerage to some of the richest and most powerful people in the world John Jacob Astor, Isidor Straus, Benjamin Guggenheim. The rich and powerful got off the ship in much higher numbers than those down below, Biel notes, but it's still true that when the iceberg broke up the party, they were all staring at the same fate. There was all at once both a great separation of class and a great leveler. That sort of specter resonates. "For a year after the Titanic, no one wanted to get on a boat," says Perry Lonzello. "Everyone followed the story because this ship represented everything about the Gilded Age. It was wealth and style unheard of.

" "You have to realize how those powerful men on the Titanic were seen in their time," says Whitcomb. "It's like Bill Gates today people who seemed to want to control everyone's lives. And at the same time, we're all on the Titanic. In the end, we all die.

" "It was real-life soap opera," says Browne. "How could we not be fascinated?

" Yet for every symbolic drama we load onto the Titanic through books, movies, plays, songs and popular everyday mythology, the real-life boat may still harbor a few first-class stories itself, way down in the dark and silent depths of the North Atlantic. "Wait until the crews go back next spring," says Perry Lonzello. "There's a cargo hold the size of the field at Giants Stadium that no one has ventured into yet. That's where the passengers put their belongings and remember, in those days people brought everything with them, because they went places for months. There is amazing stuff there. People stored automobiles in that hold. "But there's one item in particular that, if they find it, will absolutely shock people. Back in the 1880s there was an expedition to an Egyptian pyramid that removed a sarcophagus. And there was said to be a curse on it that anyone who handled it would die. "Reportedly it was put on the Titanic for shipment to a museum in New York but very quietly, as you can imagine, because of the curse. Can you imagine if they find that? The Titanic will be on every front page again.